I want to love this book. It’s core message – how we justify our mistakes and lie to ourselves in order to come to terms with them – is great. I just wish it had been shorter. I think everything could have fit into a well summarized article (and maybe it started out that way). In any event, here’s what I learned:
Self-Justification
You side-swipe a parked car, and drive off without leaving your insurance information. You feel bad, but remind yourself that the car was poorly parked to begin with. And besides, accidents like yours are common in that neighborhood. It’s practically a rite of passage.
That is self-justification, and as Tavris and Aronson show, it can explain a whole host of societal problems: sending innocent people to jail, divorcing your spouse, quack-psychology and the evangelical support for President Trump. None of this was truly surprising, and in part that’s the point. As they are apt to point out, “everyone can recognize a hypocrite in action except the hypocrite,” and that has largely been true in my own life. It’s easy to laugh at the ridiculousness of Lindsay Graham’s flip-flopping on Trump, but much harder to see how I justify my behavior in an argument with my parents, or other times when my actions conflict with my sense of what is good and right.
Cognitive Dissonance
In order to justify our bad decisions, we need a mechanism to distance ourselves from those actions. Enter cognitive dissonance, which the book defines as “a state of tension that occurs when a person holds two cognitions (ideas, attitudes, beliefs, opinions) that are psychologically inconsistent with each other, such as ‘Smoking is a dumb thing to do because it could kill me’ and ‘I smoke two packs a day.’” Cognitive dissonance for me has never been more apparent than after reading Eating Animals, when I learned without a doubt that factory farming is terrible, yet continued to think of reasons why eating animals was necessary for me (true reason: it’s inconvenient to stop).
One fascinating finding related to dissonance was around group membership. Studies found that people who have to go through a challenging ordeal to join a group are much more likely to view the group favorably than those who joined the same group without jumping through as many hoops. In other words, even if the grass isn’t greener on the other side, you’re more likely to convince yourself otherwise if your path there was challenging. No one wants to admit they’ve wasted time and energy on something not worthwhile.
Implications
The way we justify our actions, through cognitive dissonance, then has a wide impact on the world we live in. Prosecutors who refuse to believe they sent an innocent man to jail, even in the face of evidence they would otherwise accept; doctors who proscribe medications with limited to no benefit from the pharmaceutical reps who’ve been taking them to lunch. In each of these cases, an otherwise normal person finds themselves creeping closer and closer towards behavior they would have initially believed to be wrong. How? They justify breaches of those beliefs bit by bit, until they’re nowhere near the standards they had initially held.
The application of this idea to relationships was particularly relevant to me. “The kind [of self-justification] that can erode a marriage, however, reflects a more serious effort to protect not what we did but who we are, and it comes in two versions: ‘I’m right and you’re wrong’ and ‘Even if I’m wrong, too bad; that’s the way I am.’” In essence, doomed relationships are ones in which you believe your partner to be fundamentally flawed, refuse to acknowledge your own flaws, and seek out only evidence confirming that former belief. Which leaves us with this nugget of wisdom:
“In good marriages, a confrontation, difference of opinion, clashing habits, and even angry quarrels can bring the couple closer, by helping each partner learn something new and by forcing them to examine their assumptions about their abilities or limitations.”
What To Do?
Do not fear! Self-justification has a place in all of us, and is critical to moving on from our mistakes. If we never justified anything, then we would dwell on our misguided choices forever. Instead, the book says it’s important that we reflect on what we’ve done, acknowledge any harm it has caused, and then move on. “We must find a path between… blind self-justification on one side and… merciless self-flagellation on the other.”